39

Medical Officers of the Army of India.

is not at all likely to be favourable to the development or continued existence of
those forms which require an alkaline or neutral environment. The very con-
tamination of the fluid comes to render it an unfavourable medium for organisms
which, were it pure, would find conditions extremely favourable to their growth
and multiplication in it. But, if this be so, unless it were clearly proven that the
normal schizomycete population of the milk contains species which are capable,
directly or indirectly, of giving rise to disease when they come into relation to
the human organism, it can only be regarded as a protective arrangement tend-
ing to render the medium unfavourable to the development of other and possibly
noxious organisms. It is no doubt unpleasant to realise that the milk supply in
India is so highly impure as it unequivocally is, but it does not follow that the
contamination is an unmixed evil. For example, if Comma-Bacilli really be the
specific cause of cholera, there can be no doubt that the common impurities in milk
must tend to render the latter an unfavourable vehicle for the communication of the
cause of the disease, and as it is one to which there can be no doubt that Comma-
Bacilli are very likely to gain access in any locality in which the disease prevails,
those who see in them the essential cause of the disease must regard the normal
contamination, or, in other words, the normal schizomycete population of the
milk, as playing a beneficent part. The evidence, in so far as it goes, seems
to indicate that the ordinary milk supply in this country is an unfavourable me-
dium for schizomycete organisms requiring alkalinity or neutrality in their en-
vironment in order to their successful propagation and continued existence
apart from the presence of spores, and, this being so, all those who ascribe the
development of any disease to the influence of pathogenic schizomycetes may
fairly be called on to demonstrate that these are capable of surviving the con-
ditions to which they must normally be exposed on gaining access to milk, ere
blaming the latter as a means of communicating the disease. In any case it
must be a comfort to realise that if the population of India be condemned to
the use of impure milk, the very contamination is likely to act more or less in
protective fashion, and is normally due to the presence of organisms which, with
the exception of the harmless Bacillus subtilis, may be completely destroyed by
simple boiling.